


how they grew in the shade of each other

by minarchy



Category: Uncharted
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, M/M, Minor Injuries, Nightmares
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-20
Updated: 2015-06-20
Packaged: 2018-04-05 08:37:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4173213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/minarchy/pseuds/minarchy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The kid’s been tagging along behind Sully for the past twenty years, and there will never be enough time for the two of them to fix the problems they came with enough to deal with the issues they made together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	how they grew in the shade of each other

**Author's Note:**

> so i've been staring at my gdocs drafts since [renne](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Renne/) linked me the gameplay for u4 from e3 (now there's a sentence) and had me reminiscing about these dumb fucks. 
> 
> started in 2012, finished 2015, unbeta'd because i'm trash even though this is the first thing i've written in three years, jesus h.

 

     _When one of our faculties is given over_  
_to pleasure or to pain_  
_our soul will focus on that one alone_  
  
_and seem to pay no mind to any of its other powers -_  
_revealing the error in the doctrine that maintains_  
_among the souls within us one is more aflame._  
  
_**— Dante, Purgatorio IV**_

 

_How do I know you’re real?_

He’d asked, and Sully had done his best to persuade him of the truth of it in the moment; but there wasn’t enough time to properly convince him, to demonstrate the differences between hallucination and reality. There has never been enough time. The kid’s been tagging along behind Sully for the past twenty years, and there will never be enough time for the two of them to fix the problems they came with enough to deal with the issues they made together.

After they’d won, if you can ever call what they do ‘winning’, after the long trek back across Rub’ al Khali under Salim’s grateful and curious eye, Sully had meant to talk to him about it – as much as they ever talk about anything. But here they are, two weeks and 3000 miles later, Nate shaking himself awake with a breath caught ragged in his throat, eyes wide and staring. At Sully, who is realising now that standing backlit in the doorway to Nate’s room, gun in hand, is probably not the smartest idea, considering.

Nate didn’t tell him much about the hallucinations, other than he had ‘seen’ Talbot shoot Sully in the back (“Well, that’s realistic enough, at least.”) and then chased after them; and Sully might be old, but he’s no fool. He remembers the way Charlie flipped out in Syria, remembers _your face is melting off_ before the command control kicked in. And he knows a nightmare when he sees one.

“You alright, kid?” He steps forward, holsters his gun (there is no physical threat here, just the demons in Nate’s head), pushes the door to ajar.

In the half light, he sees Nate nod, shakily, and drag a hand down his face.

“I,” he says, “yeah. Just, you know. Bad dream.”

“Yeah,” Sully agrees. “Been a lot of that going around lately.”

Nate huffs a laugh, but he’s always had a terrible poker face. Sully can see his expression, even without Nate looking at him; he looks exhausted, and scared, and ashamed.

_How do I know you’re real?_

“Alright,” Sully says. “Shift up, kid.”

Nate blinks, confused, but obeys instinctively; Sully kicks off his shoes and slacks and clambers under the bedclothes next to him.

“Remember when you were a kid, and you’d climb into bed with me every time you had a nightmare?” he says. Nate snorts, quietly, and finally begins to relax, down into the still sleep warm mattress and Sully’s body heat.

“I think you’re getting confused with when your sorry ass couldn’t afford to get us more than a single bed,” he says.

“Oh ha-de-fucking-ha,” Sully says, and feels the pleased rumble from Nate’s chest as he sniggers to himself. Nate rolls closer into Sully, until he can feel Nate’s heartbeat against his side; he waits, allows it to slow and return to normal before speaking again. “So,” he says, as calmly as possible. “We ever gonna talk about what happened in Ubar?”

Nate tenses, pulls himself away. “Sully—” he says.

“No, look,” Sully says. “I was quite happy to let you deal with whatever you saw down there by yourself, but it clearly isn’t working – hell, Nate, even if you don’t want to deal for your own goddamn piece of mind, you’re gonna need to sleep properly some time. This isn’t fucking healthy, I’m telling you; you’re gonna get one of us killed, the way you’re carrying on.”

That is a low blow, and Sully knows it, but that doesn’t make it any less true; what happens on their next job, if Nate can’t function properly?

“Jesus fuck, Sully, I saw you _die_ ,” Nate says, the words exploding out of his chest, “ _again_ , only this time I actually did check for a fucking heartbeat, okay?”

“But it wasn’t real, Nate,” Sully says. “I didn’t die; I’m right _here_.”

“It felt real,” Nate says. “And—”

A pause. Sully waits for Nate to finish his sentence, but he doesn’t; he pulls further away from Sully, drawing it back into himself. He isn’t having that.

“And what, Nate?” he says. “Damn it, kid, I can’t help you if you won’t _tell_ me—”

“What if this isn’t real?” Nate says. “After the plane crash, when I was crossing the desert – I saw you there, as well, but you were just a fucking _mirage_ , Sully, you disappeared the moment I touched you.”

_How do I know you’re real?_

“Am I disappearing now?” Sully says, grabbing hold of Nate’s wrists, pulling him forwards. “Am I dead now?”

“I—” Nate says.

“ _Hell_ , kid,” Sully says, and kisses him. Hard, rougher than they normally would; he pushes Nate down and holds him there with his arms and thighs, pushing his tongue into Nate’s mouth. Nate whimpers, opens his mouth for Sully, pushes back up against him.

_How do I know you’re real?_

It doesn’t take long; he releases one of Nate’s wrists to push his hand down the front of his boxers, tugging him mercilessly whilst Nate bucks and groans beneath him. Nate wraps his hand around the back of Sully’s neck, holding him close even when their kiss becomes little more than teeth and tongue and shared gasps for air.

“Sully,” he says, brokenly, bucking up once, twice, before coming all over Sully’s fist. “ _Sully_.”

“I got you, kid,” Sully says. “I got you.”

He reaches over into Nate’s bag, dropped at the side of the bed; he always keeps the lube in the same front pouch, completely unashamed about it when security pull it out. Sully levers Nate’s knees up so he can pull his boxers off, lets Nate tug him out of the rest of his clothing as he fumbles the cap off in the half light, dribbles lube over his fingers before sliding them down the crease of Nate’s arse. Nate lifts his knees higher, braces his feet against the bed to allow Sully greater ease of access; but that is not what Sully has in mind. Instead, he grabs Nate’s shoulder with his clean hand and forces him over onto his front, holding him down between his shoulder blade as he prepares him, hard and thorough.

Nate isn’t going to get hard again any time soon; neither of them are getting any younger, but he moans his appreciation into the pillow as Sully stretches him, shifting his knees under him and rolling his shoulders under where Sully’s hand still holds him down. Slicking himself up, Sully slowly pushes his cock head inside, his fingernails digging scarlet crescents into the skin of Nate’s hip and back. They’re both still bruised from their recent fight with Marlowe and her crew, Nate especially; the bruising across his back and ribcage is a mottled expanse yellow and brown, with darker stripes where he’s caught himself on the lip of a balcony.

It takes a moment for Sully to get himself positioned, half up on his knees with the toes of one foot braced against Nate’s, leg wrapped around his thigh and calf underneath Nate’s shin, the other knee pushing Nate’s legs open so he can get the right angle to push in hard and deep.

The rhythm he sets is merciless, pounding brutally into Nate without allowing him to gain any friction against the bed to fuck himself back into Sully; he holds him down, rolls his hips, and makes him take it.

_Real enough for you?_

Nate’s moans sound ragged and muffled, mouth open and squashed into the pillow, breath hitching when Sully skims across his prostate, a broken gasp when he rubs his thumb against the stretched skin of Nate’s hole, feeling himself moving there.

“Yes,” he’s saying, “yes,” and it takes a moment for Sully to realise he’s said that out loud, face pressed into the nape of Nate’s neck.

“You sure?” he says, shifting slightly so he can change tempo to short, hard thrusts, still angled away from Nate’s prostate but dragging against his rim, feeling the muscles in Nate’s back ripple as he swears and scrapes his nails against the bedsheet. “None of your hallucinations ever fuck you like this, huh?”

“Sully,” Nate says, has possibly been saying for some time, gasping his name like he’s winded with each stroke of Sully’s cock inside him. He’s hard again, which is some sort of fucked up miracle, making Sully wonder, in an abstract fashion, when the last time he got himself off was; he can feel Nate’s balls against his hand as he rubs the pad of his thumb against Nate’s rim, feeling him shudder with every pass, drawing them higher against his body.

“Gonna come again, kid?” he asks, switching up to stoke long and deep within him, turning his thumb to catch the smooth edge of a nail against them both. Nate swears and reaches back, blindly, violently, to wrench Sully’s arm away, grabbing at his hand and intertwining their fingers. Sully gasps, laughs, lets him push their hands down to fist at his cock, feeling the swollen mushroom head bump against his fingers. “Thought you were too old for that.”

“ _Fuck_ ,” Nate says, dragging the syllable out into something beautiful and obscene, arching and rubbing his face deeper into the pillow, Sully’s stubble rasping against the back of his neck. “Watch," a pause, a wetting of lips, "watch who you’re calling old, gramps.”

Sully laughs, properly this time, rumbling out of his chest and hot into Nate’s hair. “That’s how it’s gonna be, huh?”

“That’s how it’s always been,” Nate says, and Sully can see the curl of his mouth, brilliant and cocksure even as his fingers, laced with Sully’s, tighten their fist around himself. “You’ve always been jealous of my youth.”

Nate twists and pulls Sully over him without taking their hands of his cock, his hips pumping between Sully inside him and Sully around him, kisses the laughter out of his mouth even as Sully comes, still laughing. He doesn’t pull out, feels Nate panting against his cheek, cut-off groans in wet breath and Sully almost wishes he were hard again, that he were young again, but that would be proving Nate right, and he’s right far too often as it is.

“Tread lightly, kid,” he says, instead, Nate’s whole body tensing when he twists their hands on the upstroke. “You ought to learn to respect your elders.”

“Jealousy’s such an ugly emotion,” Nate says, gasping; “besides, we already did age before beauty,” and beams at him, teeth white in the twilight of the room, so fucking smug at his own joke as he comes again, a weak spatter of semen over their fingers.

Sully rolls off him, and they lie together, sweaty and barely touching, catching their breath to the sounds of nightlife through the shutters.

“That was a terrible line,” he says.

“Aww, come on,” Nate says, sounding so much more himself than he has for the past month, near enough, since this whole damn thing started, that Sully could almost cry. Nate rolls over, presses his nose to Sully’s shoulder, flings an arm over his stomach. “You know you love me.”

He grins at Sully’s grumble. “Maybe I’m losing my mind in my old age.”

‘“I know a really great care home in Cairo,” he says, and laughs as Sully pushes him off the bed.


End file.
